The art of the cave

As usually happens in the real world, the skilled and experienced player whipped the incompetent tyro.  Trump marched into a fight he had no idea how to win, and Pelosi squashed him like a bug.  His poll numbers have crashed down through his normal floor due to all the damage the shutdown was doing, and now he's got the Ann Coulters of the world yelling "wimp!" at him for not standing fast and driving the country to total ruin for the sake of the wall, while the rage and dismay of posters and commenters across the wingnutosphere is wondrous to behold.  This is a time to gloat, a time to savor the pwnage of our enemies.  We've all earned it.

So I'm not terribly worried about what happens three weeks from now.  Hair Furor Agolf Twitler has just learned the hard way that a shutdown is not a winning strategy for him, and that he's way out of his league messing with Pelosi.  In any case, having caved the first time, he'll have that much less credibility if he tries the same thing again.

In three weeks, rather than launch another shutdown only to crash and burn again, he may well go the state-of-emergency route.  Such a move would make him look tough and decisive (in the eyes of his idiot base, but that’s all that matters to him), and even though it would be tied up in the courts for months, he could still postpone the day when it dawns on the Trumpanzees that there's never going to be any wall.

Or maybe by then he'll have bigger issues to deal with.  Like a forklift driving up to the White House every morning with the day's pallet of subpoenas from various House committees.

Elections, as the saying goes, have consequences, but we're only just now beginning to see the consequences of the election last November.  For the past two years there's been a diarrheal firehose of shit continuously hitting the fan, and it's made a hell of a mess while Congress, run by cowardly Republicans too frightened of Trump's knuckle-dragging Deliverance-mutant base to so much as reach for a mop, did nothing.  The Blue Wave put some real power in the hands of real Americans with a real leader.  Trump has just gotten his first taste of the "checks and balances" the Founders built into the system.  He's going to be getting a lot more.

And our oblivious plutocrats and libertarian dingbat assholes have had a chance to see that, yes, all those federal workers are actually doing stuff which is necessary for the systems we all depend on to function, without which we were plummeting toward the level of one of those "shithole countries" with shuttered airports, toxic lettuce, garbage-clogged national parks, and disrupted basic services.  It was a lesson taught at terrible cost.  Let us rub it in with the enemy at every opportunity, so that it need never be repeated.